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Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

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411–420 of 634 posts

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#411

Former real estate finance professional, here. If you were hoping this was a sign of the real estate market falling and perhaps its your chance to get a bargain, think again. > The company is seeking roughly $2.8 billion for the houses, which are being pitched to institutional investors, according to people familiar with the matter. Institutional investors (Blackstone, Blackrock, Colony, et al) will be being in bulk,…

>they will happily rent to you since that is the the plan all along - own all the assets, and every generation after X gets to rent

Maybe if there wasn't the NA obsession with "home ownership" none of this would matter. Part of what is driving home prices are people with FOMO paying any price. Why?

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#412
post #384

Former real estate finance professional, here. If you were hoping this was a sign of the real estate market falling and perhaps its your chance to get a bargain, think again. > The company is seeking roughly $2.8 billion for the houses, which are being pitched to institutional investors, according to people familiar with the matter. Institutional investors (Blackstone, Blackrock, Colony, et al) will be being in bulk,…

Every person or corporation that owns more than one residential dwelling should pay increased property taxes based on the number of residential dwellings they own. This is an easy problem to legislate away, our politicians are just too cowardly to decommodify housing.

>our politicians are just too cowardly to decommodify housing

I'll be 90% or more own multiple houses.

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ownership of a house in some areas becomes so expensive as to be the exclusive domain of the wealthy I agree. In fact, I live in an expensive area, but planning on moving in few years when I will be retired. Then I will buy a mansion for little money. And still gonna have plenty of savings and investments to pass onto my kids. I don't understand the ownership at all cost. You need to run some numbers and understand…

I don’t think people are obsessed with ownership for the sake of ownership. There are a large number of benefits to owning which the individual might find valuable enough to pay for: - more space - individual outdoor space - control over your own area. Can paint or remodel however you like. - Dealing with terrible neighbors isn’t nearly as bad. - location might be quieter and more desirable If we compare renting a ho…

> more space

That's hardly the case. Buy a big place, usually costs more than renting one. Or at least that's my experience. If I had to buy the place I rent it will cost me easily $3M to 4M. My rent will only pay for a 2b/1ba. I am talking about major city. Perhaps is different in suburbs, don't know.

>Dealing with terrible neighbors isn’t nearly as bad.

It is way easier to just rent a different place than having to sell your house because of that noise neighbor that likes to throw party every week end.

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#414

7k millennials will be happy to buy them up at affordable prices.

Unfortunately, at an average price of about $400,000 most of them are not going to be affordable for a typical young first-time buyer.

Most millennials are in their 30s now, so they're either not typical young first-time buyers or have deferred buying housing until now.

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be easy to fix with legislative that makes property taxes much higher for investment home properties. I don't think I've ever heard of a politician even talking about that though.

> I don't think I've ever heard of a politician even talking about that though You have to consider that legislative members tend to own property and tend to be baby boomers. They are far removed form the experiences that younger generations have to deal with - from their perspective, their home value can go up 20% in 2 years and that will be rationalized as a normal market. They are not talking about it because they…

Most baby boomers (the ones getting all the blame) usually own one house, that they live in... even if the value goes up, they need a place to live in, and the high prices are pretty much everywhere, people actually want to live. The only ones profiting from baby boomers are their kids when they inherit the houses.

Politicians are probably getting paid of by companies investing in housing and buying up hundreds or thousands of houses, because the price increases make it more profitable than many other investments, and (unless there's some legislative action) makes the investment safer than most other high-profit ones (eg. cryptocurrencies).

And the little guy gets fucked in the end.

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#416
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, youth here. The housing market remains screwed regardless of the actions of Zillow or Blackstone or whomever.

I sympathize. Unironically, I do. Truly. Be very careful over-extrapolating based on known variables. That's my point. For decades we've have the concentration of populations in a few urban centers because of employment opportunities and other factors. Two years ago, you wouldn't have even thought about that trend ending anytime soon. Yet here we are with what seems to be the beginning of a structural change to the e…

I don't have numbers but I think that remote working is tech-centric and not available for the majority of workers. Also we'll see if it sticks. In any case, I doubt it will have a big impact on home prices.

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#417

Former real estate finance professional, here. If you were hoping this was a sign of the real estate market falling and perhaps its your chance to get a bargain, think again. > The company is seeking roughly $2.8 billion for the houses, which are being pitched to institutional investors, according to people familiar with the matter. Institutional investors (Blackstone, Blackrock, Colony, et al) will be being in bulk,…

> they will happily rent to you since that is the the plan all along - own all the assets, and every generation after X gets to rent Maybe if there wasn't the NA obsession with "home ownership" none of this would matter. Part of what is driving home prices are people with FOMO paying any price. Why?

Lack of understanding of markets.

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ownership of a house in some areas becomes so expensive as to be the exclusive domain of the wealthy I agree. In fact, I live in an expensive area, but planning on moving in few years when I will be retired. Then I will buy a mansion for little money. And still gonna have plenty of savings and investments to pass onto my kids. I don't understand the ownership at all cost. You need to run some numbers and understand…

I don’t think people are obsessed with ownership for the sake of ownership. There are a large number of benefits to owning which the individual might find valuable enough to pay for: - more space - individual outdoor space - control over your own area. Can paint or remodel however you like. - Dealing with terrible neighbors isn’t nearly as bad. - location might be quieter and more desirable If we compare renting a ho…

Also, stable monthly costs.

I rent, but am looking to buy. Rent is about 2200 / mo for me; and buying would be 2700/mo for me... but in 4 years, rent will probably be 2700/mo for me and then buying will begin to make me money.

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#419

Since this is unlikely to be the end of Zillow's ambitions in this area, I foresee an arms race between Zillow and local sellers & their agents: Just like with SEO, algorithmic home buying will open up the opportunity for people to infer from the algorithms behavior which metrics or keywords it's triggered off of and respond accordingly.

How do you see that? Zillow uses local agents and their sellers to sell houses. There's no battle there. In fact, the sellers get more money from this transition because the artificial price increase positively impacts them.

Re: Zillow seeks to sell 7k homes for $2.8B after flipping halt

#420
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In less than 3 years the rent in our working class city went up 45%. I sympathize with that but I want to make sure people understand the dynamics. Prices are driven by supply and demand. If there's only one empty apartment in the city and you're willing to pay $2000/month, I am gonna have to pay $2100 month if I want to live there instead of you. That's sort of separate (though related to) prices of houses. What w…

> one way to drive prices in your city down is to have some even that renders it undesirable (..., defund the police ...) there are so many problems with your post but the assumption that defunding the police is necessarily going to cause prices to collapse is probably the most obviously biased one. the idea that you should view housing as simply a matter of supply and demand and not consider any externalities is an…

> Another way to make rent more affordable is to raise the tax rate on income generated from residential rentals to the point that people are not buying up all of the housing stock for the sake of investment alone.

Wouldn’t that just mean there would less rental opportunities because people wouldn’t rent out properties due to the increased tax burden?

Not really seeing how such a plan would work out since it would increase rents across the board from lack of supply and the higher taxes being passed along to renters.

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